Posts tagged with bittorrent

The Shape of Things That Hum is a series of 11-minute short documentaries about different electronic instruments. It goes through a bunch of classics, most I recognize the sound easily but never knew the name or the story. Here's the proper order:

1. Minimoog, the grand-daddy analog synth of them all
2. Vocoder, making a voice sound like a synth
3. Roland DX-7, the first proper digital synth
4. Roland TR-808, early drum machine
5. Roland 303, a sort of bass synthesizer
6. Various subjects
7. Akai Sampler

The whole thing was first broadcast in 2001, in Britain, maybe Channel 4? I'm not sure. In any case it seems to have been more or less ignored, and it's definitely a sort of niche appeal subject. At the moment it seems like youtube/google video is the only source, but let's hope that someone out there will make a torrent with proper quality at some point.

Here's a link to all of the episodes, the best quality I could find. Click on "More from this user" to see them all. Or just google for the title if you can't find it there.

Someone asked me recently to describe my home theatre. I've put quite a lot of thought & work into it. But not a lot of money. My goal from the start was to achieve the maximum return with the minimum of complexity.

So, right from the start I knew that it was going to be as much digital as possible. I don't care about live TV and I'm a bittorrent expert so I knew I wouldn't have to mess around with cable connections. But more to the point, being digital means you don't have to worry about analog components or duplication. For example, you can concentrate on having just a single Digital/Analog Converter (DAC)... a key component in your audio set-up.

The first thing I bought was the DAC & speakers. I had a new apartment and I wanted to be able to listen to music there. In particular, I wanted to be able to do two things: listen to music coming off my Nokia N95, which functions like an iPod, and listen to music coming off my laptop, a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of research online to figure out how I could get the best sound with a budget of $400. And I wound up finding a REALLY nice pair of speakers.

I actually restricted my search strictly to powered speakers, or, as they are commonly called, "ipod speakers"... and most of them are fairly crap. Even the ones from Apple didn't really score that well when I listened to them. I'm a musician on the side and I know what good sounds like. None of the ones I could find in stores reproduced sound the way I wanted—clean, like the original, faithful. They were bass heavy and muddy. But online I read a review of AudioEngine 5, a pair of "ipod speakers" that got fabulous reviews—from audiophiles.

You probably know that audiophiles are nutcases, but there is something to be said for their discrimination and knowledge of the art. If an audiophile says something is good, then it probably rocks if you're a normal person, even a musician like me. So, I found a deal and bought the A5s for $350. And I picked up an Apple Airport Express at the same time.

Both purchases turned out better the more I learned. The A5s have built-in amplifiers, which means that I don't need to (a) buy an amp (which I planned) or (b) match the amp to the speakers. That's a relief because sound matching amp/speakers would be a LOT of work. With the Airport Express, I started to notice something odd. When I plugged my MBP directly into the speakers, it sounded OK. But when I played through the Express, it sounded GREAT. Turns out the Express has a quite good DAC inside. Sweet! The improvement is highly audible.

OK, a little digression here about speakers. Most products, you get what you pay for. Not with speakers. Speakers are in fact somehow immune to the whole mass production economics. Most audiophiles seem to agree that most, or perhaps all, consumer grade speakers are absolute shit. To get good speakers you either spend absolutely boatloads of money, buy second-hand, or ... you can buy from very small companies, even individual crafters. Audioengine falls into the last category. Even though their website may look slick, this is a small enthusiast company that just wants to make great speakers.

What's up with that? I don't know. I think partly it's the analog ecosystem. For good analog components you just cannot avoid spending a lot of money on expensive electronics to put inside. You can't skimp or replace things with digital. You have to have huge capacitors, big transistors, lots of coiled wire, heavy metal. Good speakers are HEAVY. They are made not from plastic or even titanium but MDF—that's plywood in normal english. You can't fake this stuff, you have to have it, but it's not rocket science, just good workmanship. So, buying from a small company like Audioengine is not silly, it's a great choice. End of digression.

So... now I had a REALLY good sound system and spent countless hours discovering all kinds of wonderful things about my music collection. It really makes a difference. In fact, I admit that I've poisoned my ears on lesser systems... I just need to hear the higher quality. The music is just ... better. There's more in it, detail wise, spatially, musically, tonally. Get a good pair of speakers & DAC, and you too can discover the magic.

Next up: TV. Starting out, I thought I wanted the biggest plasma I could buy. I read all of the reviews, the dark room tests, HD movies, the works. Plasma is the best, blah blah blah. Went to a big store and suddenly I realized different. Two things for me. One: I'm only about 8 feet from my screen and I don't want to be dwarfed. So, I can knock down the screen size dramatically, in fact, I went down to 32 inches. Crazy eh? Second: I have a sunny upper-floor viewing room with a window directly opposite the display, and I intend to watch during the day. That means matte screen which means LCD. Benefits are that I save money due to the small size, don't have to worry about burn in or wasting power, and I know what LCDs are like from long experience. So I wound up with the Sharp AQUOS 32D64U. This model has 1080p, which was essential for me. I have to be future proof. It's going to be a long time before there's a higher resolution than that for films.

Finally, I need something to tie it all together, and here my Mac bias definitely played a role. Mac Mini of course. Of course it helps that they are silent, small, and look very good indeed. No ugly boxes for me. I run VLC and mplayer, but mainly Plex, and awesome port of XBMC. Video goes through a DVI to HDMI converter into the TV, and sound goes analog into the speakers (A5's have two inputs). My only complaint is again, the Mini's analog audio output is not as good as the Airport Express. Eventually I will have to buy a dedicated DAC.

This setup does everything I need, and it's got a good future. If and when I want to move up to new components, all of these pieces will make excellent secondary system components for a second room. They all go together really well, look good, and look and sound great. All told the whole system was about $2K which is a reasonable price considering that I'm basically completely satisfied at this point in time.

For the future? I might—might—try out surround sound at some point. I'm not crazy about—pointless for music, but for the movies—maybe. I definitely don't need a bigger screen. A proper external DAC, driven by USB port, is probably the next item to get, and then I would begin the search for a new amp/speaker combo. Realistically though I can't upgrade my speakers (or add a sub-woofer) until I move into a house. My apartment does not have thick walls and with the A5 bookshelf-sized speakers I can crank it up any time without waking people up.

So, there you have it... complete system, as digital as it can get, and in the $2K range. I'm happy.

I've been trying to figure out how to get a perfect CD rip on my mac. The problem in a nutshell is that ripping CDs is "unreliable", in other words, it is impossible to be sure when you rip a CD that you have the correct digital data. How good a copy you get depends on your drive and the software you use.

Why care? In the most extreme cases you can literally get blips and pops in your MP3 file. This might occur even with a totally unscratched disc. But more likely you will get a subtle degradation of quality which will be noticeable if you have a good sound system, and that sucks. So.

The gold standard in secure ripping is Exact Audio Copy, a Windows-only program and likely to stay that way forever. Why? Because you can run it in boot camp or Parallels or whatever. If you want to use EAC definitely follow a how-to guide such as Exact Audio Copy Guide. EAC does not come preconfigured properly.

If you must use a Mac-native program, check out Max, and have look online in how to set it up for maximum secure mode, because it doesn't come in that mode by default. Max was originally written more as a transcoding program (converting between formats) but now supports a linux-originating cd ripper called cdparanoia. Audiophiles still prefer EAC to cdparanoia, and I'm not going to tell them they're wrong, even though they are occasionally insane and overly conservative, so I would say stick with EAC.

Oh yeah, and I would also say, rip into FLAC format. Then, use something like Max to convert from FLAC to MP3 320 Kbps (using LAME "insane" mode) for import into iTunes, use on your ipod/phone/mp3 player, etc. In practise it's unlikely you will be able to hear the difference between a lossless format and a 320 mp3. If you REALLY need to you can use Apple Lossless until Apple supports FLAC, but I like FLAC better as it's the open standard and everyone uses it. Archive the FLAC files for the future. You get to keep a perfect copy but not waste GBs of space on your mobile device.

And by the way, if you download music from BitTorrent, you might as well get FLACs, and they are almost always ripped with EAC.

UPDATE: Actually X Lossless Decoder looks like a good replacement for Max. It has the added ability to split a single huge FLAC/CUE combination into multiple MP3s (or any other format) automatically. Just drag the .cue file onto XLD and you're away.

Vuze provides a built-in search function to make it easier to find bittorrent files that you want to download. And, it's extensible, so you can add new search "templates" for torrent sites beyond the ones that they support by default.

There's a Pirate Bay template floating around but it doesn't work any more, so I made up my own. And here it is:

Download The Pirate Bay (TPB) search template for Vuze.

To install this sucker, you can just double click the file. If that doesn't work, try this:

1. Download it (duh)
2. Do a search in Vuze
3. On the right, it says "Show results from..." "All" and then some options, and then "Add/Edit". Click Add/Edit.
4. Below the list, click "Import a new template"
5. Browse to tpb.vuze and open it.

UPDATE: some people are having trouble. Please post your Vuze version # and operating system if it works, or doesn't.. maybe there's a pattern.

UPDATE #2: It seems that if you are running in a language other than English, this might not work. If you can confirm that I would appreciate it. Thanks.

UPDATE #3 2009-12-10: The Pirate Bay changed their format a bit, so I updated the template. Click the download link to get the new one.

This week on A bit of torrent ...

...a surreal film called Three Businessmen. You may not know that you're going to like this movie. You may not thank me for making you watch this movie. But ultimately, your mind will be expanded and you will have a bit, just a bit, more sympathy for the common business-person.

Basically, you've got two businessmen, pictured, thrown together in a sort of haphazard fashion, and they go trekking across the universe (sort of) in search of a bite to eat. On the way, they have many adventures, bond, and talk a lot of silly business speak. Etc.

(Eventually there is in fact a third.)

OK, there's no plot, virtually, and no action, no violence, no sex, no nudity, no guns, no special effects, hardly any budget. But on the other hand. It's by Alan Cox, who you just might remember from Repo Man (he's also the actor on the right). And it rewards multiple viewings. And it's a bit trippy. I liked it. Will you?

Download Three Businessmen (1998) torrent from The Pirate Bay now.

Till next time: bye bye.

My name is Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Police Squad, a division of the Police Department. I just got a call from headquarters. Someone killed off a cop series in the prime of its life, and we couldn't find the body. Fortunately some new evidence turned up, and it looked like we might have found the body and it's killer.

And so begins this week's episode of A Bit of Torrent , a weekly (almost) feature of Simon Says where we highlight the absolute latest in downloadable content. This week in the crosshairs: Police Squad!

If you've ever seen Leslie Nielsen or any of the Naked Gun movies, you know what to look for. You know what I mean. Exactly. It's basically six mini-Naked Gun movies in a row.

Download Police Squad (complete) on The Pirate Bay .

Sadly, the show was cancelled before its time. Cigarette? Yes. I know.

This week on "a bit of torrent" ...

Aren't british comedies brilliant? Bittorrent — isn't that brilliant? I mean, downloading TV over the internet — what will they think of next? It's fantastic. The Fast Show, isn't it great? It's a bunch of sketches but before they wear out, they start the next one. And all the sketches are brilliant. Well, not all of them, the one with the thief wasn't so good, but then they get him off the set and on to the next one. Brilliant!

Meanwhile.... nothing will ever touch the true genius of "A bit of Fry and Laurie" — seriously, don't even go there — but The Fast Show gets pretty close at times. It's called the fast show because (a revolution in comedy at the time) the sketches are short and sweet. No lengthy build-ups here. Good ones come back in the next episodes, and they have a series of really hilarious steadies like the "brilliant" guy, who thinks everything is great, even the Nazis; Ted and Ralph, who aren't really funny, and a soccer newscaster who always goes off on a tangent about "boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts, eh?"

Most of the best characters are played by Paul Whitehouse so it's weird that I've never heard of him before. He's a bit of a chameleon. He appears in two of the attached pictures but every time, it's a different voice, a completely different look, different body language. He hasn't been in a lot of movies but even so I'd not be sure that I'd spot him.

Anyway, definitely a top pick. Here are some links. There are 3 seasons. There's also some specials out there somewhere.

TorrentSpy :

• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.1.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.2.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.3.torrent

UPDATE: ... but don't bother with season three. It's a dog.

I've been watching a lot of torrents lately and frankly, a lot of it has been crap. Like this "Around the world in 80 treasures" show where the host is just insufferable (deleted). Also I've been watching these SNL best of shows and they're pretty good. This one is the best so far.

Go and grab the torrent from The Pirate Bay or view the IMDB page . Until next week, enjoy your A bit of torrent !

Last week on 'A bit of torrent'I brought you the torrents to A bit of Fry and Laurie' . This week let's explore something a little less funny and more educational. But good. But not funny. Well, occasionally it's a bit funny. In any case, it's The Planets' , a miniseries put together about seven years ago by the combined efforts of the BBC and A&E. ( IMDB , Wikipedia .)

The Planets takes you through the formation and present state of the Solar System that we call home.

Eric Idle :

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,

That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

You'll find out in the first two episodes all about the geology of the solar system — volcanoes on Io, geysers on Titan, the resurfacing of Venus about 500 million years ago. So sorry, Mr. Python, but the sun isn't the source of all our power.

What's good about The Planets? It's got amazing archive footage that I've never seen of space exploration. It presents images as they were seen through time, so your picture of each planet progresses from the dim blobs that they knew just 40 years ago to the detailed maps that we now have from fly-bys and orbiting explorers. The computer animation is also good, although a bit of a 90s plastic feel to the solid planets. And heavy on the particle effects, which were pretty novel at the time.

My biggest problem with this series is the totally lousy music. Unlike most BBC work this has an over-the-top orchestral score by a sub-par composer. It gets annoying sometimes.

But overall the visuals are amazing, the narration is solid, the footage is fascinating, and it's pretty thorough.

The best source I found was created by MVGroup —  You can get it most easily from mininova . Here's The Planets episode 1 of 8, Different Worlds ... and here's All episodes of The Planets .

Till next time, bye bye.

Welcome to 'A bit of torrent'.

This is where I'm going to give you a link to a bittorrent file and you're going to watch it because it's cool. First the basics. A bittorrent file is a very small file that 'points'to a very large file. So a little bitty file, like, say, abit.torrent can point to a huge movie or an album or whatever.

Let's say you want to download that big movie. Well, you don't. First you download the little torrent file. It 'points'you a bunch of other people and collectively, peer2peer (P2P) you will all very quickly download the file. So to review. (A) Get the torrent file. (B) Use it to get the big file. (You need this software ).

Of course first you need to find the torrent file (or as they say, the 'torrent'). Which is not so hard if you use a good torrent search site like The Pirate Bay or isoHunt . But the best part is to find obscure cool stuff, not the pop crap that everyone's looking at but the old good stuff you can't get on TV any more (or might not think of at least). And that's where 'A bit of torrent'comes in.

Each week, or actually whatever irregular interval I feel like, I'll post a link to a torrent that I like. If you want to watch it, then you can and you don't have to search around. I'm going to start with, and explain the name of this series with, a show called A bit of Fry and Laurie' .

IMDB :

Monty Python's footballing philosophers sketch is a good example of the painful varsity guff that has been a part of British TV and radio right up until today's 'League of Gentlemen'. It isn't what Fry and Laurie do at all. They plough a completely original furrow of snatched conversation, admass and inane banter that forms an impressionistic picture of the most baffling and frustrating 'bits'of the British experience.

Basically, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry (who appeared together in Wooster and Jeeves and are both in a fair number of movies and TV shows), do a comedy sketch show.

Hugh: Good evening and welcome to "Realizing I've Given The Wrong Directions To...". Tonight I shall be Realizing I've Given The Wrong Directions To Rabbi Michael Leibovitz. Sadly, Rabbi Leibovitz is unable to be with us tonight. Till next time, bye bye.

Well, here's the link you've been so patiently reading for. A Bit Of Fry & Laurie - Season 1 Torrent Link . Find the other seasons at digitaldistractions .

Till next time, bye bye.

I never realized this before, but you can in fact make bittorrent go a LOT faster if you are behind a NAT box by correctly configuring port forwarding. All you have to do is make sure that ports 6881-6899 (or if you like with newer versions, 6999) get forwarded to your local machine. You can get your local address, if you're on OS X, using the command ifconfig.

How to know it's working? Fire up Bram Cohen's version of BitTorrent, open the peer details window. If you see on the left column, any "r"s then it's working. If it's all "l"s then not working. L/R means the connection was started either Locally or Remotely. And only with NAT fixed can you get the remote ones.

Which basically means you can now talk to all of the other stupid people who are stuck behind a NAT and haven't fixed it yet (or can't) and you get tons more speed from them.

I bought Myst IV, Revelation from amazon.ca but you know, they're a bit slow here and it's not going to arrive until next week. So, having paid I felt no problems about logging into SuprNova and snagging the bittorrent for the game. Sure, it's taken 2 days so far and I still won't get it until tomorrow, but at least I'll be able to start playing this weekend :)

Direct connect is yet another p2p file sharing program. But unlike Kazaa, it's available on OS X, partly because it's an open protocol so there's a number of application developers out there writing clients and servers. It's vastly superior to Gnutella in my opinion, both in terms of the number of results you get and the speed of downloads and uploads.
There's a couple of different clients available for OS X. The first one was the NeoModus client for OS X which quite frankly, is a nice bit of work. Too bad it hasn't been updated for like 2 years or so. It's a very, very clean, sweet interface but the functionality is just sorely lacking these days. And, it's not a very popular client with the server operators, who like to see you using a more modern client with tags, and many will kick you off without them.
The newer option is the DCGui-qt client. There's a "native QT version" available which runs out of the box without any need for extra libraries or X11. As a Mac user you will most likely be highly offended by the user interface. It takes a bit of getting used to. It's, to put the brightest face on it, clumsy. But, behind that not-so-shining exterior is a heart of gold. This puppy is seriously powerful.
The power is hidden away in the search window. Type in your search term into the "Search" tab and then click on the "Hubs" tab and change it to "Public Hubs". Now go to the hubs window and make sure to update it to a fresh list. You'll see more than 10,000 public hubs listed, many with thousands of users each. DCGui lets you search all of them in one click. It's such a big search that it can take almost an hour to complete, but the results start showing up right away in the "Results" pane. Note that there is a trade-off for this power, currently, you can only perform one search at a time.
Using this feature it's possible to find very obscure videos and get enough duplicate results to make a "multi-download". This is where you are downloading from many people at once, getting a much higher speed. I can typically saturate my DSL connection and pull down files at a rate of about 150 KB/s.
The learning curve is steep. I actually gave up once on dcgui before coming back to it (and then I discovered the "public hubs" search feature). It's under active development so we can expect more good things in the future with version 0.3.